Sunday, July 19, 2015

Sunday Sermon [Psychological Enslavement]

Hola mi gente...

I’m feeling a little anxious and it is weird not knowing exactly what I am
going to do, but I’m betting I’m doing the right thing. Two things I know: I’ll
be writing a lot more (and editing the mess that is the bulk of my previous
writing into book form), and I’m exercising regularly. So, no matter what
happens, I’m keeping mind, body, and soul as my priorities. LOL

*
* *

The Inner Plantation

It is said that when
the slaves in America and the serfs in Russia were “freed,” the chains were
laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most
slaves and serfs, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked
it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival
depended on their servitude. It is the same with individuals who have
experienced long periods of incarceration: some become conditioned to being
told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes
difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average
working stiff accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually
means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart
makes all that money?). All this in the name of profit. You can be assured that
when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make more money for Boss
Hawg as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than
likely sweating gold.

Today we measure
progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat
of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child
in some far off country). Your success is measured in how much you make off
your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much
you stand to lose.

We are all governed
by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend on for our
subsistence; a river that gives us life-giving water and news from upstream. It
has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us
believe it is the only way that a nation can be great. If we fail at education,
when our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from “developing
markets” or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost
anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she
can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit,
but just the illusion or dream of a profit, holds millions of people in the USA
and USA wanna-bes, in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder --
like gambling or drugs. But this over preoccupation with profit is far more
harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds
everything that is good and human about us into the unnamable glob of meat
by-products squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then
forgotten.

Our values are
turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in
plastic -- this is our identity. Truth has no value here. The cure for cancer
is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will
overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we
will ignore rape and genocide. For profit, we will accept and rationalize
apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in those entrusted with our safety.
For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle
mind, soul, and body doing the work of two women or three.

And here we are --
all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in the USA, but not all of us share
in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that
dehumanize us, in places where our hearts are destroyed. We -- all of us -- we live
in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political
power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves
that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised
welfare handouts for the rich plunderers, for the millions it took to look at
Clinton’s cock, and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out
our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the
history of humankind.

Broken roads and
schools, children who can’t read, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones
-- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize.
We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the
ledgers of Citibank, Halliburton, AIG, and the rest. We are the skin that
defines the monster that tells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells
us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to him and even
sacrifice our children to him.

Let us be clear: the
world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress may be defined by this margin
but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, defined by
the margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only
way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective
psychological enslavement. Like the poor souls whose minds have been broken, we
can no longer envision a world without a master...

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My life experiences have led me to strive to help others move their lives in a positive direction, exploring opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them. I like to think I sit at the crossroads of the dialectic between knowledge and action. I hope that what transpires here is reflective of my beliefs.